	Star Ocean - Till The End Of Time
	Developer: Square Enix Publisher: Ubisoft Release Date: Out Now Players: 1	Words By:
Role-playing games have evolved a lot since the days of old. Gone is the plethora of menus that confused even the most girlfriend-less of RPG fan. Say goodbye to the static turn-based combat system that let you watch your characters perform amazing moves, rather than letting you do them yourself. Say sayonara to walking endlessly around a town, talking to EVERYONE to collect items that move the story along. Now say “I wish there was a game that didn’t have all that rubbish…”, and sure enough, there is. From the Mac-daddies of RPGs comes a title greatly anticipated, finally released after a trouble-fraught development life, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time finally double-slashes its way onto PS2. Let’s start with what makes an RPG - the story. The aim of an RPG’s storyline is to keep the player constantly in a state of confusion/screaming at the TV “ferrchrissakes just tell me!!” until just before the end, when the player goes “aahh, now I understand”, just like episodes of Murder She Wrote. Star Ocean has such a storyline. We start the game on Hyda IV, a holiday planet, with Fayt Leingod, the young hero of the game, complete with wacky hairstyle, and the classic ”generic Square character traits” of naivety and stubbornness. But he’s not holidaying alone, like some desperate fool! Nope, he’s got his lifetime friend Sophia with him, along with his parents (19 years old and still going on holiday with his parents? sheesh…)... Anyways, during the holiday madness, the resort is attacked by some unknown starships, and everyone is separated. Cue some nice cut-scenes, a space battle, and some escape pods. Fayt then finds himself on an underdeveloped planet, and has to reunite himself with his parents and Sophia, as well as work out what the attackers wanted… The storyline does trundle on at a fairly slow pace, with questions needing to be answered, and they just aren’t until you get to a certain point in the game, but at least it keeps you guessing, and definitely interested. The only problem that serves to undermine the believability of the plot is the voice acting. In the old days of RPGs, you’d just have subtitles, so you could have emphatic music playing as loud as you like, and you could imagine how the characters would sound and, as Final Fantasy X proved, it’s sometimes better to leave things to your imagination. You can tell some money has been splashed around for pretty much everything except paying for some decent voice actors, rather than just some Americans off the street. Couple this with some weird timing between the dialogue, and it does spoil the mood in some places, but not all of them. Star Ocean also does away with the Final Fantasy-inspired idea of combat by random battles. The enemies show up on the maps, and you can try to avoid them, and some even chase you across their section of the map, guarding secret areas and treasure chests. This means you can’t just waltz past all of them without fighting, and with the combat system that’s in Star Ocean, you’ll want to fight the monsters. Instead of going for a turn-based system where you tell the characters to attack, and they do, Star Ocean gets you more involved, using a real-time combat system. Essentially, you can control any of your three characters at one time, switch between them really easily, and also give commands to the other two characters being controlled by the computer. You can then attack using normal attacks, or special abilities, which are mapped to the X and O buttons, for long and short range. Couple this with the use of support/attack magic, double/triple teaming enemies to create bonuses, combos that make a bonus stats bar, and much more stuff, you’ve got a combat system that’s very complicated (for an RPG), but also easy-to-use, and great fun to play. There are only a few niggles with the system, mainly being about the characters you don’t control. Although you can give them tactics like “don’t go all-in” or “conserve energy”, with every other strategy except “attack the enemy with all your might”, they just sit in the corner and watch you get pounded. Then, when they do attack, they go in too far, too fast, and end up nearly dead pretty damn quickly. This only happened in a few sections in the game, but was always in the bits where I was always nearly dead, and needed to just get everyone to work together and survive to the end… To get to the end is always a challenge for an RPG, the emphasis always being on endurance and persistance, (and making sure you picked up every item, and fought every foe, so that you’re ready for the end boss) rather than just plain skill. The game spans two discs and is long, even for an RPG. Even when you reach the end, you could get one of ten possible endings, so it’s time to backtrack, and kill that annoying kid instead of helping him…The game also has a trophy system called the ”battle collection”, which awards you for doing certain things in battle, like getting 111 damage on an opponent, or escaping 20 times. There are 300 of them to find in the game, some only being available in the higher difficulty mode, so there’s enough to keep the completists going crazy for months. Star Ocean: Till The End Of Time is the new generation of role-playing game. It combines the old (a compelling but confusing storyline, great characters, lots of secrets to find, and endless statistical possibilities) with the new (nice-looking graphics, real-time combat system and a sci-fi setting). Choose old. Choose new. Choose both. Choose Star Ocean quickly, before someone else beats you to it…

Best Bits
- An amazing real-time combat system.
- Good plot.
- Fun characters.
- LOADS to keep you busy

Worst Bits
- Voice acting and dialogue timing spoils things.
- Story takes a while to kick in.
- Die-hards will miss rolling a die to attack…


by: Crazypunk